Early memories of film admiration
Seeing as this is the first post on the new blog, I decided to take the time to try and explain myself:
I’ve had a thing for film since I was a young child. How young you ask? Well, here is one of my earliest memories involving film that I contribute to my modern day proclivity for film and theatrics. I would say I was probably around the age of 5-7 when this story takes place, making the year 1996-1998.
At our house, we had one of those big wooden entertainment centers that you put your TV on that had all those extra shelves and cubby-holes. The model we had had two little closet doors and a drawer at the bottom; this is where my family kept all of our movies and games. Now obviously, this was before we had DVDs or instant streaming movies, so the little closets and drawer were filled from back to front with VHS cassettes. We had several movies we had purchased of course, each still within it’s own sleeve depicting which movie was which, but we also had the blank VHS’s that you could buy in order to record things on television over top of. One of these blank VHS cassettes was my target one faithful evening when I decided to watch a movie and relax. I rummaged through the hundreds of thousands of VHS’s it seemed like we had to my young mind, until I had finally found the cassette I was searching for: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the hand-written title on the cassette as familiar as only a mother’s can be, comforting to me at my young age. My dad had taped it when it came on television a while back, knowing that I my oldest brother and I were both huge Indy fans. When I pushed the cassette into our VCR and sat back on the couch to enjoy the adventures of my favorite archaeologist, I was startled, you can imagine, to realize a terrible mistake had been made! A horrible, careless mistake! You see, as the opening credits began making their way on screen I was not graced, as I normally was, with the wonderful sounds of John William’s Indiana Jones theme song. Someone had recorded over my sweet, dear Indiana Jones movie, and at this point in time there was nothing I could do about it. As if this were the worst…
I could just sit there, staring at the screen that should have been showing me Harrison Ford’s face, as it instead showed me all 118 minutes of The Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure which of you have seen The Silence of the Lambs and which of you haven’t (I suggest you do if you haven’t already), but for those of you who know, age 5 wouldn’t be the ideal age I would recommend someone to watch this movie. The gruesome, terrifying nature of the film haunted me and freaked me out to no end. But here’s the thing: even after the first time I discovered someone recorded over Indiana Jones, every subsequent time I tried to watch Temple of Doom I would forget about Silence of the Lambs.
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I really think this was one of first times I realized what film meant to me. The tragicness of losing one movie I really loved, the discovery of a new movie and thus a new film genre, and the way a person could easily record one movie over a completely different movie and it mean nothing was such a cluster of feelings for me, something I never felt before. I was upset, excited, scared and angered all simultaneously.
Not to mention, this is how my undying admiration for both Harrison Ford and Anthony Hopkins began.
tylermccane 